Recently, UNRWA denied Hamas’s accusations that the relief agency wants to teach the Holocaust to Palestinian children. It now transpires that such a program is indeed in the works, though only as a small part of general human rights education.

Hamas will block the lessons, which is good. Why do Jews insist on flaunting our sorrows before our enemies? Impoverished children in Gaza refugee camps, suffering from the Israeli blockade, cannot feel pity toward Jewish victims of the Holocaust. They would laugh and cheer the Nazis, and the only lesson they can draw from their education is that murdering Jews is a respectable European habit which they should emulate.

The controversial trial opened in a court in Munich. A lot of opinion-makers, notably in Britain, oppose the hunting down of Nazi war criminals sixty-five years after the events. Demjanyuk, 89, is considered by many to be too old to stand trial.

An Israeli court acquitted Demjanyuk on a technicality. The Munich court may not want to convict an elderly Nazi murderer on flimsy evidence because the precedent would bring dozens of other elderly Nazis to trial.

The court has to decide on two issues. First, jurisdiction: Demjanyuk can only be tried in Germany if he took part in murdering German Jewish citizens, who were a very small part of those annihilated in the Sobibor death camp. Second, Demjanyuk claims that he was forced to take part in the murders, rather than volunteering for them. Unlike Jewish law, civil law generally excuses a murderer who acted under compulsion.

Jewish groups are up in arms over Pope Benedict XVI taking a step toward the beatification of Pope Pius XII. Benedict issued an edict entitled “On virtues” regarding his predecessor, evidently with an eye toward eventually pronouncing Pius a saint.

Jewish groups claim that Pius did not do enough to save Jews. But there was hardly anything he could have done, because the Nazis would have had no trouble replacing him.

But Pius did more for the Jews than any Allied or American Jewish leader. While America and Britain refused visas to Jewish refugees, the pope hid a considerable number of Jews. While American Jewish organizations refrained from violent protests against the government’s inaction, Pius launched extensive covert operations to save the Jews.

The Jewish organizations which honored their worthless leaders cannot judge the Vatican for honoring its pope.

The Demjanyuk trial brought to light a 1947 incident in the American-run DP camp for Jews, where the Americans employed Demjanyuk despite their full knowledge of his past in the Nazi forces. The Ukrainian murderer was driving a truck and deliberately ran over a Jew. Many Jews witnessed the incident, and the camp was boiling over the murder.

The Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel sought to pity the public with twisted statistics. According to the report, which was issued on Holocaust Remembrance Day, 88% of survivors suffer from chronic illnesses. No wonder: these are people in their late 80s and older. No amount of welfare funding would change that situation.

The report also claims there are 207,000 Holocaust survivors in Israel. After the Holocaust, only 600,000 Jews were numbered among the displaced persons, but over the subsequent decades the number of survivors mushroomed.

Jewish organizations are mobilizing against David Irving. A major WWII historian and a partial Holocaust denier, Irving advertises guided tours of Auschwitz at $2,650 a head. As smart as he is, he should certainly be able to show several inconsistencies at the Auschwitz site, which was erroneously rebuilt after the war. The very idea of a Holocaust denier leading tours of Auschwitz—and profiting from it—is repugnant.

But look at it this way: we want a person to be barred from our memorial site for his beliefs. How much more of a problem should we therefore have with Arabs living in the Land of Israel?

Unusually, the Fatah and Hamas governments agree on an issue. That issue is banning UNRWA Holocaust education lessons in Palestinian schools.

The issue is not whether Abbas personally recognizes that the event took place. He is no longer the Holocaust denier he was when he wrote his PhD thesis in Moscow decades ago. Palestinian Arabs, really, cannot teach their children compassion for the Jews who evicted them from their villages; and all those who live in the UNRWA camps were originally evicted. We Jews have good reason to defend the eviction, but we cannot expect the Arabs to share our beliefs.

And so the Holocaust lessons serve no rational purpose. They cheaply flout Jewish suffering in front of our future enemies, and teach them the opposite lesson: if respected European nations slaughtered their Jews, then Arabs can certainly get away with terrorizing Israelis.

Obama is due to visit the US Holocaust museum next week. As usual, some Jewish dignitaries will accompany him, and others will praise his commitment to Jews.

Instead, they should be protesting the visit. It is indecent for Obama to say “never again” while twisting our hands behind our backs to prevent us from striking Iran, which uses the same slogans and pursues much the same anti-Jewish agenda as the Germans did in WW II.

A small scandal is raging over the US president calling the Nazi death camps in Poland “Polish.” Which indeed they were, given the massive cooperation the Poles extended to the Germans in exterminating the Jews.

Obama spoke while awarding the Medal of Freedom to the late Jan Karski, who was the first gentile to bring information from the Warsaw ghetto. But his information was completely ignored by Roosevelt, and the Germans continued to operate their death camps without hindrance.